Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward. Quote from Dan Ariely’s column in the Harvard Business Review, [...]
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behavioural economics,
design,
design thinking,
experiments,
future,
management,
mindsets,
organizations,
pragmatism
Continued from the social uncertainty principle post, using the analogy of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Like virtually all of the ideas I’m describing in this series, the social uncertainty principle is a heuristic for observing ideas-in-action and overcoming fallacies that affect them. Specifically it’s a rule of thumb for working out a balance between ideas that [...]
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epistemology,
information,
intuition,
knowledge,
management,
methods,
organizations,
social uncertainty,
statistics,
think21st,
uncertainty,
uncertainty principle
I’ve been thinking about the pernicious effects of our overachievement society again, this time by way of Philip Delves Broughton (via NYTimes Opinionator), in a post called The McNamara Syndrome. The following is actually from the author’s book, Ahead of the Curve: One of the most famous alumni of Harvard’s MBA program is Robert McNamara, [...]
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best and the brightest,
careers,
creativity,
education,
leadership,
learning,
management,
opportunity,
overachievement,
robert mcnamara,
war,
work
Boston’s case illustrates the difficulty you’d have establishing a new startup hub this late in the game. If you wanted to create a startup hub by reproducing the way existing ones happened, the way to do it would be to establish a first-rate research university in a place so nice that rich people wanted to live there. [...]
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business,
change,
cities,
creativity,
culture,
economics,
geography,
harvard business school,
industrialism,
management,
new economy,
organizations,
paul graham,
post-industrialism,
roger martin,
scientific management,
silicon valley,
six sigma,
taylorism
I love this: Rather than reflexively relying on goals, argues Max Bazerman, a Harvard Business School professor and the fourth coauthor of “Goals Gone Wild,” we might also be better off creating workplaces and schools that foster our own inherent interest in the work. “There are lots of organizations where people want to do well, [...]
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goal-setting,
goals,
management,
motivation,
organizations
I made this claim (here) just after the Democratic Convention, now a couple of business gurus who blog for Harvard Business Publishing are confirming it: Barack Obama is not only an exemplary political leader, but would make an exemplary business leader as well. Bill Taylor wrote today about How Barack Obama Became CEO of the USA. [...]
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innovation,
leadership,
management,
marketing,
obama
Burying the Best and the Brightest
by OpenConceptual on 07-09-2009
in commentary
I’ve been thinking about the pernicious effects of our overachievement society again, this time by way of Philip Delves Broughton (via NYTimes Opinionator), in a post called The McNamara Syndrome. The following is actually from the author’s book, Ahead of the Curve: One of the most famous alumni of Harvard’s MBA program is Robert McNamara, [...]
Tagged as: best and the brightest, careers, creativity, education, leadership, learning, management, opportunity, overachievement, robert mcnamara, war, work